Marketing Research: Nature and Scope of Marketing Research

Nature and Scope of Marketing Research, Marketing Research as an aid to Marketing decision making, Research Designs, Exploratory Descriptive and Conclusive

1. Marketing Research:

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Marketing Research is defined as the systematic design, collection, analysis and reporting of data and findings that are relevant to a specific marketing situation facing the organisation.

Larger companies like Hindustan Unilever, Procter & Gamble have their own marketing research departments, while small companies can hire the service of a marketing research firm like 1MRB and others.

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Marketing Research Design:

The five steps of an effective marketing research are as follows:

1. Research Projects may be specific, i.e., for a specific study/problem or exploring, i.e., its goal is to shed light on the real nature of the problem and to suggest possible solutions or new idea or project maybe descriptive, i.e., + it seeks to ascertain certain magnitudes, such as how many people will buy a shirt for Rs. 500/- per piece.

Some research project may be casual, i.e., to test a cause and effect relationship, such as whether young college students would buy more soft drink bottles if they are available in the college canteen.

2. This step calls for decisions on the data sources, research approaches, research instruments, sampling plan and contact methods.

The researcher can gather both primary and secondary data and both. Primary data are gathered for a specific purpose and secondary data may already exit somewhere. Usually, a research starts the investigation by examining secondary data before, resorting to collect costlier primary data, if required.

Important secondary data source is the customer data base. Even though, secondary data is valuable, sometime it may be inaccurate, incomplete or very old, in such case, the researcher has to collect primary data. A researcher can collect primary data for marketing research in five ways, i.e., Observation, Focus Groups, Surveys, Behavioural Data and Experiments.

Many companies now-a-days conduct focus groups on the internet to take advantage of the lower cost and faster feedback. In the case of Behaviour Data, customers leave traces of their purchasing behaviour in a Retail Store’s Scanning Data, catalogue and Internet purchase records or customer data bases.

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(a) Research Instruments:

Two main research instruments are used in collecting primary data, i.e., Questionnaires which consists of a set of questions to be presented to respondents for their answers; and Mechanical devices like Galvanometers, Infrared eye-tracking systems etc. are used to measure the consumers view websites respectively.

(b) Sampling Plan:

After deciding on the research approach and instruments, the researcher must design a sampling plan based on the following:

(i) Sampling Unit, i.e., who is to be surveyed – the researcher must define the target population to be sampled.

(ii) Sample size—i.e., how many people should be surveyed? Large samples give reliable results.

(iii) Sampling Procedure i.e., how should the respondents be chosen? To obtain a representative sample, a probability sample of the population should be drawn. After determining the sampling plan, the researcher should use contact methods for contacting subjects; these are mail questionnaire, telephone interview, personal interview and online interview.

2. Collect the Information:

Due to advancement of technology and communication systems, the data collection methods, have improved.

3. Analyse the Information:

Analysis is done by tabulating the data and then applying various statistical techniques.

4. Present the Findings:

The researcher presents the major findings that are relevant to the key marketing decisions facing the management.